Theory suggests a certain means of cleaving closer to the world by arranging a trick of distance from it, to be able to stand back from the onrush of things by attending to a pattern and thus recognising them more deeply. It offers partaking in a dance of expansion and contraction of thought, one of immanence and transcendence twisting and running through each other in recursive yet unrepeatable movement. This range of dynamics is one that may often be frozen, codified, (...) subject to measurements or called to order in numerous ways and which in turn may offer its own sets of tests and cruelties. Yet it has no inherent speed, or necessary scale of operation, but it is the activation of the movement in which it is found. An examination of theory’s trajectories through media ecologies could take a number of turns. One might: follow through the way in which it is articulated through filiations of ideas and genealogies and their relation to specific media; work through the histories of the book and of texts, in technologies, markets and other modes of circulation; trace how transformations are enacted on and through theory by means of politics, technology or wider cultural shifts; or explore how theory sets itself up as a residue catcher of other domains. One might track theory as a kind of peer-reviewed cultural industrial waste, but it may also suffice to pay attention to this movement of theory, and some of the different kinds of revealing faultiness it makes possible. This essay suggests how media theory might think alongside what it gets rather wrong, the phenomena which fuel its capacities of misrecognition and with which it overlaps: to think theory as media in the way that it addresses, modulates, transmits, and provides interference. I propose to do this both through engagement with two writers, Charles Fort and Alfred Jarry, who exemplify certain excellences of error and through analysis of an interesting kind of object characteristic of Cybernetics: thought experiments carried out in hardware. (shrink)

This thesis is a response to the increasingly widespread belief in the potential for technology and modern science to enable finite subjects to overcome the essential limitations constitutive of finitude and, hence, subjectivity. It investigates the truth and extent of such claims, taking as its focus quasi-miraculous technological developments in neuroscience, in particular Brain-Computer Interfacing systems and cognitive imaging technologies. The work poses the question of whether such emergent neurotechnologies signal a profound shift beyond receptivity and finitude by effectively bridging (...) the gap between interiority and exteriority. Organised around a quadripartite division, the thesis pursues this idea firstly with regard to the act of artistic creation; secondly through an exegesis of Kant’s account of the original or infinite creativity of the Supreme Being; thirdly through readings of Freud and Jung and their respective models of the psyche; and finally through an interrogation into the possibility of telepathy and the various ways in which it can be conceived. Each chapter thus takes place as an extended thought experiment, exploring the consequences of a seemingly unprecedented proposition that promises to eradicate the finite gap between internal and external. This is followed to the limits of conceivability before asking in each case whether we may in fact need to rethink the very premises around which each proposition has framed the problem. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to operationalize A.N. Whitehead's ontological approach within sociology. Whitehead offers lessons and clues to a way of re-envisioning `sociological practice' so that it captures something of the nature of a `social' that is at once real and constructed, material and cultural, and processual and actual. In the course of the article, the terms `operationalize' and `sociology' will themselves be transformed, not least because the range of objects and relations of study will far outstrip those common (...) to sociology; further, the term `operationalize' would seem to retain the notion of a stable sociologist-subject translating precepts into methods. So, the article will follow Whitehead's shift in emphasis toward an understanding of much more relational, heterogeneous and emergent entities — which in turn will require new methodological approaches. In staking out these claims, we follow in an intellectual lineage in which Whitehead's presence has been profound but generally oblique. For it is clear that, while Whitehead has informed various writing, little attempt has been made to draw out, more or less systematically, some of the general methodological tactics that would allow us to practise a Whiteheadian sociology. (shrink)